


Tacoma

by ellispark



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Great Breakup of Season 15, M/M, Season/Series 15, deancaspinefest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:27:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 20,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23496766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellispark/pseuds/ellispark
Summary: After an explosive fight, Castiel leaves the bunker and Dean decides to let him go. As Cas ventures halfway across the country on a journey to find himself, Dean reevaluates what he needs from life.And what he needs is Cas.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 82
Kudos: 587
Collections: Dean/Cas Pinefest 2020, The Destiel Fan Survey Favs Collection





	1. Out of My Mind

_“Might make it to Memphis_  
_But if that ain't far enough_  
_I'll speed down the highway to Tulsa, Missoula_  
_So fast that the hurt can't catch up_  
_I'm burning your memory_  
_One mile at a time_  
_All the way to Tacoma_  
_By then you'll be out of my mind”_  
**_Tacoma, Caitlyn Smith_**

Cas drives.

Dean didn’t stop him. Dean didn’t even _try_ to stop him, and that’s what’s worse. A decade of fighting alongside one another, years and years of mutual trust and respect and what Cas believed was love, undone with a few words. Dean laid the blame for everything that goes wrong in their lives at his feet.

_Why does that something always seem to be you?_

He has made mistakes — numerous and vast mistakes. Cas has lied to Dean, spilled the blood of his brothers, taken up the mantle of God and found himself, again and again, so incredibly unworthy. But Dean has always been there, even in his anger. For a man with no faith, Cas knows Dean believed in him.

Not anymore. Not anymore, and for what? Maybe he should have, could have said something about his suspicions about Jack — but what good would it have done? What would it have changed?

It’s unfair: Dean’s judgment and his inability to see past his own grief to even briefly consider Cas’s; Sam’s silence in the midst of his brother’s growing anger; the Winchesters’ constant need for his powers outweighing their concern for him as their supposed “brother.” They are not fair to him. Belphegor was right. He’s their tool, and it’s a lesson he’s learned the hard way.

And when a tool is no longer useful, it’s discarded.

* * *

He drives aimlessly, endlessly, trying to outrun his own thoughts. By some mistake Cas makes it to I-70, which he then follows past Topeka, skirting Lawrence with his hands tight on the wheel. He breaks off onto I-49 in Kansas City because he feels he has to put at least one state between himself and Dean before he can rest. He drives on until the plains of Kansas give way to softly rolling hills in Missouri and Arkansas, and he does not stop.

He has an idea that he might drive and drive, only pausing for gas, and never stay in one place. He might become a permanent wanderer, a watcher on the outskirts of humanity the way he was meant to be before he got too involved — before he fell in love. Cas thinks he might drive through the United States, go up to Canada or down to Mexico. There’s more room there for him to lose himself and to lose Dean, to stop and breathe and finally grieve Jack properly...

But then he gets tired.

* * *

He picks a well-lit truck stop just on the edge of Memphis when he pulls over for the night. Even here, outside the hustle of the city, Cas can see the lights polluting the horizon as humanity keeps its all-night vigil. _They ruin everything they touch,_ he thinks viciously, then feels guilty when a father carrying his sleeping child over his shoulder passes him on his way inside the store, giving Cas a small smile as they go.

Cas is hungry, not just tired, so he buys a pre-packaged turkey sandwich and a water bottle with his cash, ignoring the clerk’s sniff when he places the wad of unrolled bills on the counter. Dean told him once most people prefer to keep their money lined neatly inside their wallets, but that never mattered to Cas. He wasn’t human then, and he had no use for that particular propensity. He’s becoming human now, if his growling stomach is any indication. He places a hand over it, trying to quiet the feeling of dread more than the burbling of any acids.

Human and alone. Again.

He left his truck parked toward the back of the lot, in a dark corner behind a cluster of 18-wheelers similarly bedded down for the night. The sodium lights at the pumps are still too bright, but Cas doubts he’ll sleep well regardless. With no other cars to focus on, no road signs to read and no music playing softly in the background, he knows he’s going to think of Dean, and only Dean, for the rest of the night.

Just as Cas reaches the truck he hears a soft cough coming from behind him.

It’s strange, how for a moment his head lifts and his heart constricts and he feels a great certainty that when he turns around, Dean will be standing there. Come to find him. Come to take him home for good. That illusion is shattered almost instantly. There is no Dean — only a trucker, short and balding and holding his cap in his hands as he shifts awkwardly from foot to foot.

“Can I help you?” Cas asks with a touch of irritation, irrationally angry that this man is not Dean Winchester.

“Maybe,” the trucker says. His voice is rough, but not with a low timbre like Dean’s. It’s scrubbed and raw, the clear sign of a lifetime smoker. “I was wonderin’ —” The man shifts some more, and Cas stares at him. “You just seem like maybe you might could use a little company tonight.”

“Company?” Cas repeats, turning the word over in his mind, wondering what about him gave this man the idea he’d want companionship. Does he look that miserable? He supposes it’s kind of the man to take notice, if nothing else. “I appreciate the offer, but—”

“Understood,” the trucker says, already backing up. “You have a good night.”

Cas watches the man hurry back to an 18-wheeler a few spots down, a puzzled furrow in his brow. He shakes his head, climbing back in the truck. He takes four bites of his sandwich before discarding it to the floorboard. As he curls up in the front seat, legs too long to settle comfortably, it hits him.

“Oh,” he breathes. Dean told him once, after several drinks, that more than one trucker had propositioned him for sex in his youth, and Cas asked _did you ever say yes?_ They sat in silence for a long time before Dean nodded slightly. They never spoke of it again.

Cas is not interested despite knowing the meaning behind the man’s shifty eyes and plainitive words, but he realizes with a pang that this complete stranger, someone he’s never met, looked at him and longed for him when Dean Winchester, the sun around which Cas based his orbit for ten years, cannot look him in the eye. And Dean will never touch him or love him or—

The tears are hot and stinging, running down his cheeks and into his ears as he stares at the ripped upholstery of the truck roof and tries to sleep.

* * *

There’s a case in Tulsa. Cas knows this because he looked for it when sleep wouldn’t come, scrolling through news reports on his phone in the wee hours of the morning.

Tulsa is dangerously close to Lebanon. The Winchesters are bound to know about the grave desecrations in a Midwestern city so close to their own territory. He decides to go in spite of this.

He decides to go because of this.

* * *

There are no Winchesters in Oklahoma. There’s only a ghoul feeding on the corpses at Rose Hill Cemetery. Cas catches it easily enough, waiting until it’s feeding before sneaking up behind it and sliding his blade under its throat. It drops the bloodied arm it’s been gnawing.

“Please,” the ghoul says, and Castiel can’t see its face but it’s wearing the body of a young woman. “I haven’t hurt anyone living.” Its voice shakes. “I can’t help what I am. I’m just doing what I have to do to survive.”

Something in her voice rings true. Rings familiar. Cas thinks of Jack, his open face and kind nature giving way to nothingness, soullessness, and his heart breaks anew.

He lets her go and tells her she has to find new feeding grounds away from the city. She flees, and he puts her meal — an old man, now with one arm chewed into pulp from wrist to elbow — back into his grave. He even says a worthless prayer for the man’s soul, not to God, but maybe to his few remaining siblings. Maybe to the universe.

It takes a long time to refill a grave alone.

The Winchesters would be disappointed in him for letting the ghoul go so easily, but Cas tries to convince himself he’s done letting them judge the morality of his actions — done letting them judge his humanity.

Is it right, is it _good,_ to threaten those you love with words and weapons? _No,_ Cas thinks vindictively, _I’m not the one who tried to kill our son; I’m not the one who was harsh and cruel and blindingly self-righteous. I’m not the one who’s wrong._

* * *

There’s a diner in Topeka where he went with Dean once. They serve apple pie with melted butter on top of the crust. Cas stops there on his way to nowhere in particular.

He comes in after the lunch rush has faded. The waitresses — two teenage girls and an older woman with her hair in a bun — are sitting in a corner booth, rolling utensils into paper napkins. One of the teenagers rolls her eyes when she spots him, but the older woman smiles, the skin around the corner of her eyes crinkling.

“How can I help you, son?” she asks, and he resists the urge to tell her he’s far too old to be her son.

“Table for one, please.”

“Sure thing, sugar.” He follows her back to a four-top near the jukebox, listens half-heartedly as she explains the lunch specials just ended and the dinner specials don’t start for another two hours. “But,” she tacks on at the end of her spiel,“it’s Taco Tuesday, so any of the items under our Mexican menu are still under special pricing all day.”

Dean once told him never to order tacos, lobster or fish at diners. “Diners are for burgers and chicken fried steak,” he insisted. “That other stuff is better somewhere else man, trust me. You want enchiladas, I’ll show you the best enchiladas the next time we’re in Texas, okay? And I’ll say this, I’ll make one exception, and that is for diner fried catfish. Salmon? No fucking way.” None of this made sense to Cas at the time because he didn’t need to eat, yet Dean always insisted upon trying to feed him anyway.

To the waitress he says, “I’ll take a Caesar salad” to spite a Dean who isn’t there.

While she bustles off to the kitchen Cas discreetly checks his wallet, thumbing through the cash stuffed inside. A couple twenties, one ten, three fives and six ones. It’s not enough to last him long. He also has three credit cards, all tied to the Winchesters. Easy to trace. He pinches the bridge of his nose.

The waitress comes back bearing a glass of water. “You doin’ okay?”

“Yes, fine,” Cas lies, and she leaves him alone.

He discovers from the first bite that he does not enjoy Caesar salad, yet he forces it down, gulping three glasses of water. Even the croutons, which Dean once called “the one good part of Sam’s rabbit food” taste stale to him. This meal is probably not worth the six dollars plus tip he’ll spend on it, and that thought brings tears to his eyes rather unexpectedly.

“Sugar?” a cautious voice says, and he blinks around the moisture to look up at the waitress. He reads her name tag — Ann. Of course. “Are you sure you’re okay? I know our salads aren’t great, but I’m hoping they’re nothing to cry over.”

It’s a weak attempt at a joke, but Cas sputters a wet laugh, then presses both hands into his eyes to try to dampen the flow of tears. “It’s not the salad,” he says. “It’s—”

He almost says _it’s the cost of the salad and the money I’ll run out of soon and the fact that I have to do this alone again when I thought I had a home and a family._ Then he remembers he’s not supposed to tell strangers everything about himself. It’s not _normal_.

He hears the chair next to him scrape across the linoleum floor.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Cas isn’t normal. He never will be. He’s an angel with shredded wings and seventy dollars to his name and a broken, too human heart, and he wants to tell someone he’s not fine at all. He lifts his hands and blinks at Ann. She’s looking at him with kindness in her eyes, and over her shoulder he sees the teenage girls have gone. He’s alone with her. He’s not being judged.

“It’s—” Even when he wants to speak, the words crawl up in his throat. “I’m lost,” is what ends up coming out.

A wrinkled hand gently touches his. “If you’re talking literally, I’ll get you a map, sugar. But if we’re speaking metaphorically, I’m afraid sometimes we have to keep wandering till we’re found.”

Cas looks at her, and his tears blur her soft face and gray hair. “I thought I’d— I hoped I was found, but… the person who found me didn’t want me.”

The edges of her pink lipsticked lips pull down in a frown. “Oh, honey.”

He can feel the heaving sobs that want to wreck their way through his chest, and he tries to choke them down. How can a simple touch and a few soft words leave him open and vulnerable, an utter wreck? Is he really so starved he’ll collapse at the sight of scraps?

“It’s all right,” Cas hears Ann say, “you let it out. There’s no one around but ol’ me.”

* * *

Ann gives him the salad “on the house.” He learns that means free. He leaves her a tip worth more than the cost of the meal and a scribbled “thank you for being there,” on his blank check. He doesn’t eat the slice of apple pie she brought him, but he does ask for a to-go container so her feelings aren’t hurt.

Cas might have been unconsciously headed back to the bunker before, but after his purge he knows he can’t go there. He can never go there. He takes I-70 west, ignoring the exit for State Highway 14, the road that would take him north to Lebanon.

He drives through the vast emptiness of Kansas, and the stars unfurling across the night sky remind him somewhat of Heaven. Jack loved the stars.

When he reaches Cheyenne, Cas avoids several kitschy motels that look like places the Winchesters would inhabit — cheap, themed, on lonely stretches of dark road. He stops at a Motel 6 in a crowded part of the city, next to two other chain motels and several car dealerships. The rows and rows of black and white SUVs and trucks look soulless and stale.

“We’ve got free Wifi and HBO,” the bored desk clerk tells Cas as she checks him. She’s paying more attention to the reality television show playing on her desktop computer than to him. “Check out’s at 11. Free continental breakfast from 6 a.m. to 9.”

He has to give her a credit card for the room, but he’s too tired to worry about the Winchesters tracking him down. He’ll figure out how to get his own card tomorrow. Maybe he’ll call Claire, ask her to help him with it.

The room is simple — just a bed, desk and TV stand for a box set that must be at least a decade old. The carpet is thick and blue and stained in the corner under the trash can, and the bedspread is a riotous print that Cas squints at for several seconds, trying to discern what it might be. He gives up when his eyes start to burn.

_Family Feud_ is playing, so Cas watches it until it bleeds into _Wheel of Fortune_ and _The Price is Right_. He flips through a few channels to see if he can find something better, but HBO is playing reruns of _Six Feet Under_ , and he promised to save that to watch with Dean. Cas pauses as soon as this thought crosses his mind, shakes his head, and switches back to HBO. Soon he realizes he’s too lost to follow whatever is happening on screen, so he gives up and turns the TV off. The static discharging across the black screen is loud in the quiet of the room, until Cas hears a thump coming from next door.

He cranes his head around to look at the wall just as someone moans, low and long. A blush heats his cheeks, and Cas turns his head back quickly, as if he’s Dean caught watching porn. And that’s what this sounds like — Dean’s porn. He couldn’t hear it with the television off, but now the thumps are coming loud and steady and a woman is keening, high pitched and desperate. Cas fumbles for the remote, and it falls off the bed.

“Oh, yeah,” says a female voice, followed by a man’s “fuck, _fuck._ ” Cas whispers, “fuck” in response and screws his eyes tightly closed as if that will block out the sound of the near simulatneous orgasms happening in the room next door. Even their gasps as they come down bleed through the thin walls, and Cas hears the bed squeak as one of them rolls off the other.

“That was good,” the man says as Cas rolls over to fumble for the remote so he doesn’t have to hear the tender aftermath. Just as his fingers grasp the end of it, the woman says, “Mmmhmm. Worth $200 then?”

Of course. Dean told him these cheap motels “draw johns and hookers like moths to a flame,” but he’d almost forgotten humans constantly have sex without any love involved. _He’s_ had sex with no love involved, though he resolved long ago if he ever were try it again, it would be with someone he loved, someone he trusted. Someone who knew him inside and out.

He would gladly have tried with Dean.

Cas closes his eyes and listens as the woman gathers her things and makes her exit, leaving the man in the room next door watching TV alone. Just like Cas.

* * *

He runs out of cash near Billings, where he uses his last twenty to buy a couple gallons of gas and a hot dog. He eats the hot dog sitting in the bed of his truck, watching cars whiz by on the highway. Cas calls Claire and gets her voicemail.

“Hey,” she says, surly and sulky even over a pre-recorded message, “you’ve reached Claire’s phone. If I don’t answer this one, try my other number.” _Beep_.

Cas takes the phone away from his ear and looks at it. She didn’t have a second phone the last time they talked, and he can’t think of how to get her other number without calling Jody and revealing he’s left the Winchesters. He dials again, this time leaving a quick message. “Claire, it’s Castiel. Could you give me a call? I — Uh, I don’t know what your secondary number is. All right. Goodbye.”

He decides not to stop in Billings — after all, he helped create the mountains in the Lolo National Forest several millennia ago, and he knows from the map on his phone that they’re only a few hours drive away. It’d be nice to see them again. It’s been so long.

The drive into western Montana is beautiful, a vast improvement on his trek through Kansas and eastern Wyoming. The swaying fields of the plains give way to dense forests and ever rising terrain as he approaches the Continental Divide. He’d been trying to make his way to this forest years ago, back when he was first human, and he’d ended up detouring to the south, headed to Idaho instead. He couldn’t stand the thought of being dwarfed by his own creation, small and insignificant in the face of the power he’d once welded. He’s becoming human again, but this time he doesn’t care. He thinks the mountains would be a comfort, like old friends. Heaven knows Cas doesn’t have enough of those.

And there they are, jutting up drastically from the ground, writ large across the open sky in all their glory. He speeds through Missoula, not stopping to rest until he’s at their feet. Cas parks his truck at a pull-in next to a trail head, hiking the short distance to the edge of the foothills that cluster like ant mounds around the larger mountains’ bases. A few other hikers send him curious looks — who in their right mind would go hiking in a billowing trench coat? — but he ignores them.

“Hello,” he says to no one. The mountains all had Enochian names, once, but it’s been so long and he’s been through so much he can’t remember what they were. He doesn’t know what their new names are.

Cas cranes his neck up, staring at the point where the mountains meet the sky, white snow caps and lush green forests clashing with bright blue. For a moment, he’s not in Montana. He’s not even in Heaven, directing the continental divide as it pushes and prods this very terrain into existence. No. In his mind, Cas is looking at other mountains, smaller ones, on the shore of a lonely beach in Washington, waiting for the savior of the world to arrive.

He blinks and Lolo National Park is back, but all he can think is _Jack would have loved it here._

* * *

It’s a natural progression for him to end up in Washington. This is probably where he intended to go from the moment he left Dean behind.

He has a home there — one he owns, where he can stay until he gets back on his feet, whatever that means. And Jack was there, was born there — if there’s any residual power left from that event, enough to bring him back — well, Cas has to try.

He gets a final motel room in Tacoma. North Cove is only a two-hour drive from the city, but he’s not sure what shape the cabin is in now, and his drooping eyelids tell him he needs a warm bed and a non-leaking roof over his head. Cas uses the credit card the Winchesters gave him for the room, signs the name Jimmy Novak at check-in. The brothers aren’t looking for him. He’s been gone for days, and they haven’t even called. Sam’s texted a couple of times, sure, but nothing of consequence. And Dean —

Cas lies awake and listens to the sounds of the city outside his window — the rush of cars along the highway, the muffled laughter of women walking by his door. North Cove was silent. Beautiful. Peaceful, at least until Lucifer showed up and stabbed him in the back.

_I’ll go there and see if I can feel him,_ he tells himself. _Rest for a bit. Then if I don’t find anything I’ll move on._

_I’ll move on._


	2. Like a Shallow Grave

_“A red river of wine won't drown you_   
_No amount of time could wash you away_   
_No holy prayer's gonna save me_   
_This love affair is like a shallow grave_   
_Oh, give me a shot, strong as you got, baby_   
_'Cause I don't wanna feel a thing”_   
**_Novocaine, Caitlyn Smith_ **

It takes Sam a week to ask Dean where Cas went.

He waits until after a case, when they’ve settled into a motel in Omaha. It’s not like it would be hard to drive back to the bunker at this point, but — well, frankly, Dean can’t stand the thought of going back to those empty, echoing rooms. Sam must feel the same, because he doesn’t even fight Dean on stopping for the night when they’re only three hours from home. He also doesn’t comment when Dean pulls out his flask and takes another swig, but Dean catches the look Sam gives him. Pursed lips, narrowed eyes. It’s his Dean, You Might Be An Alcoholic look. Dean downs the flask in one go. Sam looks away.

“Hey,” he says after a beat, eyes on his phone. “Have you talked to Cas today?”

The whiskey seems to burn more than usual as it goes down. Dean wishes he had more left.

“No.”

“No?” Sam sits on the bed, and the springs groan beneath him in protest. “Don’t you guys check in with each other all the time now?”

“No,” Dean says with a little more force than before, throwing a shirt out of his duffle and nearly across the room. He doesn’t even remember what he was looking for anymore.

Sam looks at Dean, flask in one hand, still digging in his bag with the other, and sighs. “Look, I know things have been strained lately, but—”

“He’s gone, okay?” Dean snaps, unable to wait for the rest of that sentence. “So just fucking drop it.”

“Gone?” Sam repeats blankly. “Gone where?”

 _Where_ is a fair question for Sam to expect Dean to answer, because Cas does tend to go, to leave, to get gone, all the damn time. Flighty as a bird, even with broken wings — that’s Cas. He’s impossible to pin down, impossible to make stay. Sam probably thinks he’s found some other cause, some other mission to stake his life and grace to, because whenever Cas does go, he always comes back. He almost always tells them where he's going, too. Or at least he tells Dean.

Not this time.

“I don’t know,” Dean says. He’s wondered. Obsessed over it, really, from the moment he heard the bunker door slam behind Cas. Where the hell did he go? Where could he go that he would be welcome? Sam and Dean are all he has, and he walked out on them. Thinking about it now, Dean feels the fury building up in his chest again, hot and heavy and curling like smoke around his heart.

“What do you mean you don't know?” Sam asks, voice low and dangerous. Like he’s questioning a suspect, not talking to his own damn brother.

“I’m done playing twenty questions.” Dean grabs clothes out of his bag at random, prepared to make his escape for the bathroom. “Ask Akinator or something.”

“I’m asking you,” Sam says. “He hasn’t responded to a single text I’ve sent him in the past week, and I want to know what’s going on.”

At this point, Dean kind of loses it. It’s been a long week — it’s been a long fucking life — and he’s exhausted. He’s faced down demons, angels, God himself, and now Sam just won’t stop poking and prodding at him about Cas, and _that’s_ the step too far.

“You want to know what’s going on? What’s _really_ going on?”

“Yeah, Dean, that’d be—”

“What’s going on is our entire fucking lives are fake,” Dean interrupts, concise and vicious. “We’re puppets, man. Nothing but fucking puppets on strings that have just been goddamn cut, and now that Cas is a real boy he’s decided to use his free will to ditch us. So good riddance.” Dean takes a long swig from the flash, a toast to Cas. _Fuck him_.

“He wouldn’t just leave,” Sam says, but there’s a glimmer of doubt there. Dean almost feels bad about it for a second. Part of him doesn’t want Sam to think Cas abandoned them— the part of him that’s been screaming since Cas left _it’s your fault it’s always your fault you asshole you failure_ isn’t locked down tight enough, is ramming at the bars on its cage, wanting to tell Sam _I did this._

“Well, he did,” says the rest of Dean, who’s pretty good at denial when it suits him.

Sam’s eyes narrow, assessing. Dean doesn’t like that look.

“What did you say to him?”

_Why does that something always seem to be you?_

Because he just can’t stop saying things he knows he’ll regret, Dean snaps, “Fuck you, Sam,” and storms out, flask in hand.

* * *

At a very early (i.e., illegal) age, Dean Winchester learned how to scope out a good dive bar.

When John Winchester was otherwise preoccupied — organizing his weapons, hunting monsters he deemed “too much” for Dean, scribbling furiously in his journal — or when he’d just up and vanished, Dean would walk the streets of whatever podunk town they’d stopped in looking for the dirtiest dive he could find. The grungier, the better. The kind of place where no one checked IDs or batted an eyelash at a scrawny teeanger with an attitude problem. The kind where drunks would stumble over themselves to be hustled in pool and no one would dare call the fucking cops, even when the fists inevitably came out. The kind where, as he got older, Dean could flash a smile at anyone pretty — male, female, who cares — and they’d smile back, desperate to get out of there and looking for the same goddamn thing as him. An escape.

He might be pushing forty now, but he’s still got it. This place he found tonight is cleaner than most — the bartender’s been wiping the counter tops at least, and the bathroom floor only had one suspicious puddle instead of multiple — but the rules for any old dive bar still apply. Dean walks in, he looks around to see who’s looking back, and he sees his target. She’s a brunette in a low cut top and boot cut jeans, nursing what looks like a vodka cranberry at the end of the bar. Her eyes rove over his body, predatory. He smiles at her, and she smirks back.

Jackpot.

“Shot of whiskey,” he tells the bartender, taking the seat next to dark-haired and dangerous. “And another vodka cranberry for my friend.”

“Friend?” She raises an eyebrow. He ignores the fact that her eyes are the wrong shade of blue. “That’s a tad presumptuous.”

“I prefer to think of it as optimistic.” Dean downs his shot, and she shakes her head and takes a sip of her drink.

“I’m guessing a guy with a face like yours can afford to be optimistic most of the time.”

Dean thinks of the weight of a gun in his hand, Jack’s body on the ground, the devastation in Cas’s perfect blue eyes. He shakes his head, motions for another shot. “You’d be surprised.”

The bartender passes him another and he shoots it without preamble. His drinking partner watches with what could be amusement — or it could be pity. He doesn’t know her well enough to read her, doesn’t care. No attachments. That’s what tonight is for.

“Drinking to forget something, are we?” she asks coolly. “Or should I say someone?”

He sees no reason to lie. If her pity might get him laid tonight, so be it. “Bit of both.”

“Well, cheers.” When she raises her own glass to her mauve-stained lips, he sees the faint white stripe around her ring finger. Double jackpot. He’s about to flag down another shot to numb up a bit more for what comes next when her hand shoots out to grab his. “Let’s get out of here before you get whiskey dick, sweetheart.”

He vaguely thinks _please don’t call me that_ before he lets her drag him off his stool and out the door, calling over her shoulder, “Put it all on my tab, okay?” as they go.

She leads him to a red Mustang that’s seen better days, pushes him against the passenger side door. She’s aggressive, her mouth on his within a second, hands reaching around behind to cup his ass through his jeans. _I’m not drunk enough for this_. That’s what he almost says, but she bites it back for him with a shove of her tongue in his mouth, far down his throat. She tastes off, but he couldn’t say how.

One hand snakes around his thigh, cups his junk and presses, massaging. When that doesn’t seem to inspire a response, she huffs a slight laugh and jerks down his zipper. “Uh,” Dean manages to say, because they are in the middle of the parking lot, but her hand is already inside his boxers, stroking insistently.

Nothing, just a twitch at the pressure. He throws his head back.

“Tell me two little shots didn’t do this to you,” she whispers against his neck.

“Sorry,” he says, and this isn’t a speech he has much practice giving. After Hell he couldn’t get it up for a while, even when he tried, but this — fuck, this is what he needs, this is why he’s here. She looks up at him, and her eyes are wrong. Everything is wrong.

“Sorry,” Dean repeats, “I don’t know what’s—”

She presses a finger to his lips. “I have something that might help.”

The meaningful look on her face is a pretty big tell, and Dean normally doesn’t do this kind of thing — he doesn’t need drugs to perform, damn it, and he knows it’s not smart, taking a pill from a stranger — but tonight it would be nice to forget the shitshow that is his life. Tonight would be nice to float. He lets her open her car door and deposit him inside on the passenger seat.

When she gets in, she digs in her purse for a moment before pulling out a little baggie and offering it to him. It’s halfway filled with a white, powdery substance.

“Uh,” Dean says again, “I don’t do cocaine.”

She laughs. It’s mean sounding.

“Me neither. It’s ketamine. Just take a bit. It will help you loosen up.”

“Ketamine?” He thinks of the name, and comes up with only one association. “That’s for depression?”

She cocks her head and eyes him knowingly. “You seem depressed to me.” She shakes the baggie. “C’mon. Doctor’s orders.”

Dean, contrary to most people’s first impressions, is not an idiot. Sam (and Cas) have accused him of harboring a death wish, and maybe that’s what this is. Maybe that’s why he takes the bag, dumps a chunk of its contents in his palm, and snorts it like he has a damn clue what he’s doing. Dean’s not examining his actions that closely. If everything he’s ever done has been scripted, maybe God predestined Dean Winchester to take drugs from a sketchy bar hookup and die of an overdose, lonely and alone.

Who the fuck knows now that Chuck’s gone, and who the fuck cares? Certainly not Dean.

* * *

It’s funny how fast it hits him. It seems like one second the woman from the bar is all over him, grinding in his lap, kissing him roughly, and then he’s detached. Undone. Drifting, aimless, for the first time ever. He can see himself, sprawled across the back seat of this chick’s car, lipstick stain on the corner of his mouth, eyes open wide and unblinking. It’s like being dead, but he doesn’t feel dead. He feels warm all over, just… weightless. Like everything that’s dragging him down is gone. Like he’s slipped free, suspended somewhere beyond all the pain.

Well. Not all of it. Because as he floats, Dean still finds himself reaching for the one person who could always ground him.

 _Cas_ , he thinks _, you bastard, I miss you, you left me, where are you, I didn’t mean —_ It all blends together in the end. He doesn’t remember the woman putting him in the backseat, doesn’t know if he’s really even there or if he’s alone, in the vast and empty. He feels like he’s watching his own body, and it’s pulling further and further away from him, all the taut strings that held him down breaking with a snap.

The woman’s eyes are black. Or maybe not. But they aren’t the right shade of blue.

* * *

“I can’t believe you,” Sam says the next day when Dean’s coming down from his high. His eye is bruised from where Dean punched him when Sam came to “rescue” him from the “demon,” who really was just a chick looking for a good time that Dean ended up not providing in the least. “You voluntarily took roofies to get out of having a real conversation with me.”

Dean keeps a hand over his eyes. His body feels like his now — or at least it feels as much like his as it normally does, which is… not saying much. Multiple possessions and learning that God himself scripted your reality tends to warp a guy’s self-image.

“Sam, can it, okay? I am not in the mood.”

“Right.” Sam snorts, loud and ugly. “You never are.”

Dean lifts his palm from his face, cracking one eye open. “How’d you find me, anyway? Did what’s her name call you?”

“No.” Sam frowns at him. “Cas did.”

Dean’s heart seems to constrict at that, twisting in his chest. “He— What?”

“You prayed to him, dumbass. Guess he heard you. He thought you were in trouble. You really could have been, too, Dean. I got there before she could do anything to you, but we don’t know what her intentions might have been. Taking unknown substances from strangers— I mean, seriously, dude, what the hell were you—”

Sam keeps talking, winding himself up like an angry little jack-in-the-box, ready to pop in Dean’s face at any moment, but Dean’s stuck on _Cas_ and _prayer_ and _he listened, he still cares_ , and before he knows what he’s doing, he’s got his phone out and he’s pressing number two on his speed dial.

Even Sam shuts up when Dean puts the phone to his ear, face still indignant but blessedly silent. In the quiet, the ringing is louder than a bomb.

 _Beep._ “This is my voicemail. Make your… voice… a mail.”

He tries again. And again. And again. And again and again, until Sam says, “Dean.”

Dean hangs up, and Sam doesn’t say anything when he throws his phone against the wall, or when he lays back down, fist pressed against his eyes. Pity sure has done a lot for him lately — got him drugged, got his brother to back off when Dean probably needs him to push harder.

Didn’t get him Cas, though.

What’s dead is dead.


	3. Damn You

_“I get so mad I see red, get so deep in my head_   
_Hear your name, and it's all slow motion_   
_Feel a little insane, like there's venom in my veins_   
_It's like you’re leaving me again all over_   
_Damn you for breaking my_   
_Damn you for breaking my heart”_   
**_Damn You For Breaking My Heart, Caitlyn Smith_ **

The cabin has a leak in the roof that has drip, drip, dripped water into the nursery, distorting Kelly’s mural and warping the wooden floor. Cas closes the nursery door. The bedroom across the hall, Kelly’s bedroom, holds only an iron bed frame with a stained mattress and a dresser still packed with her clothes. Cas doesn’t look too closely at the stain. He knows it’s blood.

Blood is also dried and congealed in a large spot on the dining room table. He touches the spot, confused. _Who bled here?_ he wonders. One chair is pulled out at the head of the table, crooked, and he pushes it back in. The leak from the nursery has distorted the ceiling in the living room, and the kitchen is covered in dust and dead insects. Of all the rooms in the house only the bathrooms seem to have been spared major issues, but Cas hasn’t tried to turn the water on yet so he can’t really be sure.

The food in the fridge has molded and sprouted its own delicate ecosystem, and Cas sighs as he throws all of it away. The non-perishables in the cabinets have fared better, although the bread based products are lost to the ravages of time. Although he finds curled up spiders everywhere, thankfully there aren’t any signs of rodents. When he does turn on the tap in the kitchen sink, the water spurts brown before clearing, and then he uses it to wash a pot to heat soup in.

He’s watched Dean make soup — homemade, not canned like this — many times. Watched him add in vegetables, spices, meat, stir and taste and smile. Cas never tried any of Dean’s soup. He never needed to eat it. But he suspects it doesn’t taste like the chief ingredient is sadness the way his own does.

He sleeps on the couch. It’s lumpy and uncomfortable, but he can’t bring himself to spend the night in that bed.

While he stares at the rain-damaged ceiling, he strains and strains with his grace, what little is left of it, searching for a sign of his son.

He feels nothing.

* * *

Cas drinks too much in the coming days. He ventures into South Bend, the little town across the bay, for groceries and liquor, then he goes back to his hole to indulge in some tried and true Dean Winchester style coping mechanisms. He sips whiskey straight out of the bottle, throws an old lamp across the room, ignores the world and watches cartoons on Sam’s Netflix account.

Sam calls, and Cas doesn’t answer.

Then Dean prays, and he does.

 _Cas_ , _you bastard, I miss you, you left me, where are you, I didn’t mean—_ The prayer is a mess, a slurred jumble of words, but he manages to catch the _don’t know what she did me_ , and that’s enough to send him into action. He’s angry at Dean, hurt by him, but the thought of Dean in trouble stills hooks at something in the very core of him, something deeper than his grace, and he can’t let Dean’s call go unanswered. The phone call with Sam is quick, perfunctory, and when it’s all over Cas sits on his bed and waits for the text that says, “He’s ok.”

He wonders when Dean calls him the next day whether he should answer. Demand a direct apology, demand an explanation. He worries if he does speak to Dean all his resolve will crumble, and he’ll go home to be a person-shaped punching bag once more.

So again Cas doesn’t answer, and again he drinks. It doesn’t help.

* * *

Dean’s first voicemail simply says, _“Cas, answer your goddamn phone.”_

 _Oh_ , Cas thinks, bright burst of anger like a wildfire in his chest, _fuck you, Dean Winchester._

He doesn’t respond.

* * *

There’s a hardware store in South Bend. It’s next to the liquor store. On his second week in Washington, after he’s thrown up just as much liquor as he’s consumed, Cas decides on a whim to visit the hardware store instead.

A bell chimes when he enters, and a man calls from the back, “Be with you in a second!” Cas has never been in a hardware store before, so he amuses himself by wandering the first aisle, wondering at the wide variety of bolts and screws humanity has invented.

He knows the cabin needs repairs — many, _many_ repairs. The roof, the floors, the rotting front porch, the mildew-covered tub in the upstairs bath. The front door doesn’t lock; there’s a draft coming from the window in the hall. He’s not delusional. He has no skills to complete any of these tasks, but while looking over the power tool display he has the strangest urge to _try._

“Hey, sorry. I was taking a phone order.” Cas is startled by the voice coming from behind his shoulder, jumping before he turns to face the man. “Oh, sorry again!”

He’s tall, blond and thin, with a tan borne of a lot of time in the sun. His name tag says, “Sam,” and Cas almost laughs. Of course his name is Sam.

“It’s all right,” Cas says, hand over his heart. “I was just daydreaming.”

“Home renovations?” Sam asks knowingly.

“Yes. I just bought an old cabin in North Cove, but I’m afraid it needs a lot of work.” Cas looks out over the store. He doesn’t know the names of more than half of these items. “I’m not sure where to begin, though.”  
  
“I love a fixer-upper,” Sam says, his smile brightening. “I’ve helped with a few renos around the bay — lotta water damage on these old houses, naturally. If you give me an idea of what your top issues are, I can direct you to the tools for the job.”

“Uh, the leak would probably be the worst?”

Sam lets out a little chortle. “Yeah, yeah I’d say a leak is pretty bad. Better than falling into the sea like some places, though, right? Well, if you need to replace any lumber, that I don’t have, but I can send you to Bud’s down the road. For a small leak you can patch it pretty easily yourself. Let’s see, we’ll need a pry bar, hammer, caulking gun…”

Sam chatters on, blindly unaware of Cas’s ignorance in all matters of home repair, discussing the benefits of one type of caulk over another. He keeps saying “we” — _we’ll check out those all-weather tool boxes later; we can getcha a pretty good discount on shingles if we order through this website; we’ll need to ask Bud about replacing that porch_. Cas knows it doesn’t mean anything,just an idiosyncrasy of Sam the Handyman, but it still makes him smile.

It makes him feel less alone.

He buys too many things and puts them all on the Winchesters’ credit card, and when Sam waves goodbye he says, “Let me know if you need any help! Like I said, I love a good reno!”

* * *

Bud at the lumber store says he needs photos of the wood used for the porch and the floors before he’ll let Cas place a “useless order,” so at least one person in town has picked up on his incompetence. It leaves him in a bad mood again as he drives to the cabin alone with the bed of his truck full of bags from Sam’s hardware store.

He doesn’t notice the missed call from Dean until he’s pulling into the driveway. He idles the truck in front of the cabin, phone in hand, staring at the _Missed Call from Dean_ and _Voicemail from Dean_ notifications until his vision blurs.

Might as well get it over with.

 _Cas,_ Dean says, and his heart sinks at the sound of that beloved voice, no matter the hurt it causes. _Where the hell are you? Call me back_.

Cas barks out a laugh, bitter and furious. The audacity of this man, the carelessness, the disregard. He can look at his own damn credit reports if he truly wants to know where Cas is; he can apologize if he truly wants to talk. He can act like Cas exists for reasons beyond himself, can realize he’s not the only one in pain. He’s not the only one who lost someone he loved.

He leaves the phone in the car. Let it ring all night, if that’s what Dean wants. He won’t answer.

As he walks inside, Cas avoids looking at the spot by the shore where Jack’s power breached the womb, breached worlds. The place where he died.

The place where maybe Dean would have preferred he stayed dead.

* * *

He doesn’t know what possesses him to do it, but Cas calls Sam from the hardware store for help with the roof. He needs help, yes, but he’s so unused to asking for it that the very words feel strange to him. It’s not until after Sam has agreed to drive to North Cove that Cas realizes he’ll expect compensation of some sort, and he’s out of cash. He spends the next hour fretting over how to pay his new acquaintance, pacing the yard until Sam’s truck (much newer and nicer than his own) pulls into the drive.

“Howdy ho!” Sam says, slamming his truck door, eyes on the bay beyond the cabin. “Wow! Sweet spot!”

Cas goes to greet him, holding out a hand to help carry some of the tools he’s brought, but Sam shakes his head. “No worries, man, I got it. Damn, that view. I’m gonna get distracted while roofing with scenery like that!”

Cas turns to follow his gaze over the bay. It is an incredible view. He’s been neglecting to even notice it, holed up inside with nothing to keep him company but whiskey and bad memories.

“Sam,” Cas starts to say as his new friend bounds toward the house, trailing behind Sam like a dog owner might trail after an overly excitable puppy, “I forgot to go into town to get cash to pay you with. Would you rather come back—”

“Nah, man,” Sam interrupts, smiling over his shoulder at Cas as he tests the boards of the porch with his feet. “You bought a bigger haul from me than anyone else has in over a year. I’m happy to provide a few hours of free labor for my new favorite customer.” And then he winks.

“Oh,” Cas says, flabbergasted. “Well, all right. Thank… Thank you.”

“No worries!”

Sam keeps up an extraordinarily high level of energy as they work, stripping the warped shingles from Cas’s roof and patching up the spot where the water damage has rotted through the wood underneath. He talks about everything and nothing — his store, South Bend, the weather. It’s comforting, like a radio playing one of Dean’s mixtapes in the background. Of course, once he thinks that, Cas thinks Dean would most likely be annoyed by Sam’s constant chatter, and his mood sours a little. Sam doesn’t seem to notice.

By the time they’ve finished with the rough patch and placed a tarp over the wounded area, Cas’s stomach is growling fiercely. They climb down from the roof and head to the kitchen, Sam still yapping, and Cas sets about making sandwiches. He glances over at the dining room table — he hasn’t quite managed to get the dark spot out of the stain at the head of the table, even after scrubbing all the blood off — but Sam takes a seat at the opposite end.

“Man, this place could be real nice.” Cas simply hums in response, piling lettuce on top of turkey breast. “And even though you’re on the bay, you’re not up against the erosion line. That’s great luck.”  
  
“Erosion line?” Cas asks, smearing mustard across his bread.

“Yeah. No one told you about it?”

“No.”  
  
“Huh.” Sam pauses for a rare moment. “Well, see, most of North Cove was built on sandy soil, and for the past couple of decades it’s been slowly sinking into the Pacific. I guess you haven’t really been into the town itself much, or you’d have seen it — there’s a whole neighborhood with houses hanging off the edge of a cliff, roads to nowhere.”

“The whole town died,” Sam continues. “Not literally, not like the people, but the town itself. Everyone moved. Hard to keep anyone around when everything they own is falling into the sea left and right. There’s a couple people still out here, sure, but I bet they’ve got a hell of an insurance deductible. What’s even the point, I wonder, unless you’re so entrenched in your home you can’t imagine leaving, no matter how bad it gets.” He pauses for a second, shrugs. “The ocean, man. It’s one hell of a force. Just chipping away at the land over time, slowly wearing it down until it breaks and crumbles. Kinda cool, in a sad way.”

“Yes,” Cas says. Through the window, a bird sweeps across the yard, headed out toward the water on swift wings. “I suppose so.”

* * *

Dean’s third voicemail says, _I need you to pick up._

“What about what I need?” Cas asks the night.

He receives no response.


	4. I Wonder If You're Happy Now

_“I think about you all damn night_  
_I think about you all damn day_  
_I think about you driving around in the same little town_  
_And going on without me baby_  
_I wonder if you're happy now_  
_If you're ever gonna be_  
_I think about you all the time, all the time, all the time_  
_Do you think about me?”_  
**_Do You Think About Me, Caitlyn Smith_ **

It’s now been three weeks and four days since Cas left. Not that Dean’s been keeping track.

Fuck it. He has been keeping track. Three weeks, four days, nine phone calls and three voicemails left unanswered. Cas even quit responding to Sam after Sam assured him he’d found Dean and brought him home safe.

He said he was gone, and he meant it this time.

So it goes.

The Winchesters are still taking on hunts, putting miles upon miles on Baby’s odometer, staying in shitty motels — everything they used to do, back before Chuck rode a wrecking ball into their lives. Or, in truth, all the things they used to do _because_ Chuck wrote them that way — two brothers with hero complexes and daddy issues and a need for blood who just can’t leave well enough alone, even when they have the option.

Nothing has changed. So why can’t Dean sleep at night?

He knows it’s Cas. Deep down, in the furthest recesses of his mostly deeply repressed thoughts, the dark and murky place where everything he can’t handle dwells, Dean knows he misses Cas. _Needs_ him, like he needs his damn heartbeat.

He can ignore it most of the time. Focus on Sam, focus on the job. If he needs something else to feel shitty about, something to take the edge off the pain, he can just focus on Mom or Jack or any of the other countless people they’ve lost. He misses them, too — fuck, he misses Mom and Jack so much that sometimes it hurts to breathe through it, waking up gasping with the phantom feel of his mother’s hand on his face or the memory of Jack’s small, delighted smile burned into his corneas. Dean has pain to spare.

But at night, when he’s listening to Sam snore across the room or tossing and turning alone on his memory foam, that’s when he can’t hide. That’s when he can’t push it down. That’s when the intrusive thoughts rise up out of the dark depths, surging up into the light.

_I did this. I broke this._

_I would be happier if you were here. Are you happier without me?_

He’ll close his eyes and try to keep the thoughts to himself, try not to think _Cas_ and call to him. He doesn’t even know why he does it, why he tries to hold back. Pride, anger, hurt. Pick any of the above, pick them all.

Dean and Cas have been broken for a long time. He’s not even sure who landed the first blow, but when he’s alone without his thoughts, Dean can’t outrun the knowledge that he threw the last.

* * *

“Claire called,” Sam says. Cas has been gone for three weeks and five days. “She wanted to know why I hadn’t helped Cas set up a new credit card. She said she had to do it for him.”

Dean’s in the middle of changing the oil on the Impala, and he doesn’t look up as he says, “I guess baby bird really has left the nest. Full-on financial independence.”

“Dean.” Sam’s voice is strained. “I’ve tried not to push since the whole… drugs incident, but we need to talk about what happened with you and Cas.”

“I’ve told you,” Dean says, replacing the dipstick and wiping his dirty hands on his work jeans, “there’s nothing else to talk about.”

“Why would he get his own credit card? He doesn’t know anything about how to keep a scam running.” Sam follows Dean as he closes the Impala’s hood and walks out of the garage, his long legs keeping up with Dean’s fast pace with annoying ease. “I don’t think he’s coming back on his own, and if you don’t go get him now, we’re going to lose track of him. And who knows if we’ll be able to find him again.”

“Cas is a grown-up.” Sam sticks with him all the way into his bedroom, watching as Dean strips out of his dirty clothes, his bitchiest eyebrows raised toward the ceiling. “Hell, he’s more than a grown-up, he’s like twenty times as old as Methuselah. If he wants separate bank accounts, he can have it.”

“So I guess you get custody of me in this divorce.”

Dean stops searching for a flannel to glare at his brother. Sam gives as good as he gets, crossing his arms over his chest.

“You wanna go chase after Daddy, then you be my guest,” Dean says, because two can play that game. “But he left to get cigarettes, and he’s not coming back.”

Sam refuses to rise to the bait. “It needs to be you. You know it does. Snappy voicemails are not gonna work, Dean. You need to go get him.” Sam sighs, and his whole body seems to deflate with it. He’s not sleeping well, either. Dean can tell from the bags under his eyes. Rowena, Jack, Mom, Cas — Sam’s carrying them all with him, all the time. “Whatever happened, you need to make an effort to fix it. We need him.”

“Yeah, well.” Dean squares his jaw. “I tried that line already.”  
  
“In person,” Sam says. He holds up his phone. The notes app is up. There’s an address typed there, but Dean doesn’t read the whole thing. “Look, I got into his credit history. His last purchase with our card was here, last week. You can find him if you go now.”

“He doesn’t want to be found.” Dean pushes past Sam to get to the hall. He just needs to get away, to not think about Cas and the wreckage of his life for four fucking seconds, and he can’t do that with Sam around. “He chose this, so leave it.”

Sam doesn’t follow him out the door, but he does stand at the bottom of the war room, yelling up at Dean, “He’d choose you if you just asked the right way!”

There is no right way. If there was, Dean burned that bridge long, long ago, and now he’s trapped on the wrong side, watching the ashes drift away with the wind. Watching Cas through the flames.

* * *

He doesn’t go far. Sam will worry. When Dean’s not busy being pissed off at him, he recognizes his brother is having a pretty hard time of it lately. He doesn’t mean to make it harder, he just — feels trapped. And when he feels trapped, he lashes out.

Just like he did to Cas.

Dean tries not to think of him, or anything, as he trolls backroads around Lebanon, spinning his wheels and kicking up dust with a classic rock mix playing over the radio. The little town is in his rearview within minutes, and there’s nothing but open road and cornfields ahead of him. He sings along to Billy Squier, tuneless and thoughtless, and when the track segues into “Fortunate Son,” he sings that, too, ignoring the prickling feeling building behind his eyes. He taught Jack this song, once. Taught him to drive down a country road like this. It feels like a different time, before it all went to hell.

When the last riff of the song plays out and John Fogerty’s warbling ceases, Dean only feels relief for a moment before the opening notes of “Thank You” start to play.

He reaches up to take out the cassette, but his finger pauses, hovering over the eject button.

_If the sun refused to shine_  
_I would still be loving you_  
_When mountains crumble to the sea_  
_There will still be you and me_

He put this song on Cas’s mixtape, number thirteen of Dean’s Top 13 Zepp Traxx. It had to be the last one, didn’t it? It had to be the final swing in the last inning, two outs, bases loaded.

He’d still missed.

_Little drops of rain whisper of the pain_  
_Tears of loves lost in the days gone by_  
_My love is strong, with you there is no wrong_  
_Together we shall go until we die_

Dean would have been okay with it — with never having Cas as anything other than his friend. He would have lived with it. He still meant every word he couldn’t say, every word he let Plant croon for him.

Forever. That’s what he’d wanted.

_And so today, my world it smiles_  
_Your hand in mine, we walk the miles_  
_Thanks to you it will be done_  
_For you to me are the only one_  
_Happiness, no more be sad_  
_Happiness, I'm glad_

He thought Cas would be with him forever. Hadn’t he said as much, once? That he’d stand by Dean’s side, even as he burned the world to ash? Dean as a demon, Dean under the thrall of the Mark didn’t push Cas away. In the end, it was just regular Dean — bitter, biting, unfair and unkind — that made Cas leave.

_If the sun refused to shine_  
_I would still be loving you_  
_When mountains crumble to the sea_  
_There will still be you and me_

He is getting teary eyed now, the road before him blurring. Dean pulls over, wincing as the Impala bounces on a rut before coming to stop alongside a field of sunflowers. He wipes at his eyes, turns the radio off.

 _I will never be over you,_ he thinks, with startling clarity, and then he can’t stop thinking about Cas. _I will always wonder where you are. I will always worry. I will wonder if there’s someone else; I will always know I fucked this up. Me. It was me._

He fumbles for his phone, has it out of his pocket and in his hand with Cas’s number dialed before he can stop himself.

 _You’re my best friend,_ he thinks, and he thinks it _to_ Cas, prays it to him. _I miss you, I need you._

“We’re sorry,” says a female voice, stiff and robotic, “this call could not be completed as dialed.”

* * *

Dean doesn’t go home. Instead, he texts Sam.

 **Dean:** Send me that address10:14 a.m.

Sam responds within seconds.

 **Sam:** 1504 Paynes Alley, South Bend, WA 9858610:14 a.m.

 **Sam:** Good on you10:15 a.m.

 **Sam:** You know where that is, right?10:15 a.m.

 **Sam:** Near North Cove. Where Jack was born.10:15 a.m.

 **Sam:** Go get him and bring him home, ok?10:15 a.m.

“Okay,” says Dean, taking a deep breath as he adjusts his hands on the wheel. It’s going to be a long haul. “Okay.”


	5. Crooked Halo

_“I won't ever be perfection, ever be your golden child_   
_I'm not spinning on this planet just for me to make you smile_   
_I love my crooked halo, hell, I won't apologize_   
_You can judge it all you want, but no matter how hard you try_   
_You won't burn out this starfire”_   
**_Starfire, Caitlyn Smith_ **

The cabin is looking much better now.

The roof is fixed — Cas hired a professional to finish it at Sam’s urging — and the floors underneath the leak have been torn out and replaced. The porch is the last massive project, though Cas doesn’t delude himself — there are many “minor” projects yet to go.

He finally bought a mattress from a furniture store in Tacoma to replace the one in Kelly’s old room. Although it’s not memory foam, it’s nice to sleep on a real bed for once. He no longer wakes with his back aching and his neck sore, even if he can’t stay in that room except to sleep. Too many ghosts. Most of the time, he prefers not to venture upstairs at all.

Sam asked Cas what he’s planning to do with the place — live in it or leave it — and Cas realized he didn’t have a good answer to that question. He’s not comfortable here, exactly. There’s been no lingering sense of Jack, no feeling like coming home, but the cabin is _his_. He bought it (well, Jimmy bought it), and he’s remodeling it to make it livable, and he sleeps and eats and slowly turns human within its walls. He’s thankful for it, while at the same time resenting everything it reminds him of — of all the loss he feels as he lays in bed every night.

Feelings are complicated, human or not.

When he starts to get upset, Cas throws himself into one of the house projects — cleaning the tubs, dusting the floorboards, trying to get decades worth of soot clogs out of the fireplace. Today, the project is pulling up the old porch, and the upset is… well.

 _You’re my best friend_. It had been so faint, hard to make out. Dean prayed something else, after, but those four words were all Cas got. And they’re not enough.

It’s easy to tear things apart. It’s much easier than putting them back together, he’s learned. Fixing the roof and the floor was a painstaking process — measuring everything twice, lining everything up so it fit together just so — but pulling out warped wood and damaged shingles is easy. Cathartic. He doesn’t even bother calling Sam for this part. His good cheer would just get in the way. Cas is angry, livid, and he’s taking it out on the porch.

 _You can never just tell me what you really mean_ , he thinks as he pulls at a rough nail with the pry bar, wrenching it out inch by painful inch. _You can never just say you’re sorry_. Jack, Mary, all of it, he can’t bear to think about it, so he thinks about Dean, callous in his messages and open in prayers he probably thinks Cas won’t hear. _I cannot do this with you anymore,_ Cas thinks at Dean, which is more than a touch hypocritical, since Dean will never hear him say what he means, either.

The board tears free from the nail with a _thunk_ , and Cas rips the rest out with his hands, pulling it free from the rot and tossing it in the soon-to-be-burn pile off the porch. Sam started piling all the old wood on the patch of soot and charred grass out front before Cas could tell him not to, saying “Hey, looks like you’ve already had quite the bonfire out here!” What could Cas say to that? _Don’t, I think they burned my body there?_

The next board comes easier, almost pulling apart under his gloves as soon as the nails are pried away. He throws it with great force, and it lands in a cloud of dust. _What do you want from me?_ he asks of Dean, _why do you do this to us?_

He finishes clearing out the bad wood in under three hours. Destruction comes easy.

* * *

Sam likes to eat at the one Chinese restaurant in South Bend, so that’s where Cas meets him. His friend has already claimed a booth when Cas comes in, a variety of noodles and meat dishes spread out across the table. Cas has discovered he enjoys egg rolls, and there’s a plate of them just for him across from Sam.

“How goes it?” Sam asks cheerfully, because cheer is his default. He’s so different from the Winchesters, even the one who shares his name, and sometimes his upbeat questioning catches Cas off guard and he can’t help but think how terrible it would be if Sam ever learned the supernatural world is real. “You sure look like you’ve had a productive day.”

Cas glances down at his shirt as he takes his seat. He’s still covered in dirt and dust, even though he washed his hands before sitting down.

“I pulled up the porch this morning.”

“All of it? By yourself?”

“Yeah.” Cas reaches for the sweet-sour sauce. “It wasn’t difficult.”

“Well, when do you want to put in the replacement? We’ll have to place a new order out at Bud’s; the porch is a different wood from your flooring.”

Cas hadn’t really thought that far ahead. He’d just wanted to get it over with, and it’s dawning on him that now he has a massive hole in the center of his porch with nothing to cover it with.

“Uh,” he says, “as soon as possible, I suppose?”

Sam shakes his head, taking a big bite out of his General Tso’s chicken. “You in a rush to get out of town, Cas?”

Sam has asked him questions like this before, pointed in a soft way, like a velvet-tipped pen. He’s searching for something in Cas’s answers, and Cas isn’t sure he’s getting what he wants to hear.

“No, it’s not that,” he says, spearing some pork with a chopstick. “I just needed the distraction today.”

Sam watches him eat, thoughtful in a way Cas wasn’t sure he knew how to be, as much as he usually bounces around like a high-energy toddler.

“What are you running from?”

Cas’s chopsticks pause halfway to his lips, mouth hanging open. He hadn’t thought he was that obvious.

“No worries,” Sam says quickly, hands up in a placating gesture. “If you don’t want to talk about it, we don’t have to. It’s just— You seem distracted a lot anyway, and not by the house. By something outside of it.”

For a moment, Cas feels something swell up in his throat, behind his eyes. _You’re my best friend_. He shoves it down.

“Sam, I can’t— I can’t really talk about it,” he says, keeping his eyes on his food and willing them not to water.

“Fair enough.”

They eat in silence for a while, which is odd in and of itself. Cas can’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that Sam is watching him, though he’s barely looked at his friend since he came in. The food tastes like dust in his mouth, like the grit he breathed in while he was ripping out boards, and he knows it’s not the restaurant’s fault. He pushes his plate away.

“I should get back to the house,” he says. It’s a poor excuse, but Sam nods.

“Don’t worry about the bill,” he says as Cas reaches for his wallet, “I’ve got it.”

Cas realizes as Sam goes for his own wallet, thumbing through receipts and coupons to get to his bills, that he’s much more perceptive than Cas gave him credit for. They’ve only known each other for two weeks, and Sam has deciphered that Cas is running away, that he’s anxious about money, that he’s alone. He keeps inviting Cas out, stopping by unannounced to help with the house, picking up meals every now and then. The pure and simple kindness of it all makes his heart ache, but in a good way for once.

“Sam,” Cas says, and Sam looks up from counting the tip out. “Thank you. For everything.”

‘No problem.” Sam smiles at him, easy as always, though there’s something different behind it. “You know we’re friends, right, Cas?”

And perhaps it should have occurred to him sooner, but Cas feels relief wash over him, hearing Sam say it so openly, without any qualifications or attachments.

“Yes,” he says, with a small swell of pride. He made a friend, a human friend, all on his own. “Yes, I know.”

* * *

When he stops in the grocery store to pick up more milk, Mabel behind the counter waves at him. When he goes to the lumber yard to fill out a new order, gruff Bud claps him on the shoulder and thanks him for his business. Stewie at the gas station asks if he wants to try a Snickers or a Milky Way this time, and Tracey, the little girl who’s always playing hopscotch outside the house next door to the Conaco, reminds him to come back on Tuesday for her lemonade stand. Fifty cents for one cup.

As he drives back along the familiar, winding road to North Cove, Cas wonders _do I belong here now?_

He wishes he knew the answer, but the thought of Tracey, lips stained with chocolate and pigtails in disarray, yelling, “Mr. Cas!” makes him smile all the same.

He’s doing it — he’s _living_. He might think of Dean, and Sam, and Jack all the time, but he is doing his best to move on. He’s carved out a spot, small but significant, in this tiny town, and he did it without help. He did it by being himself. Cas wasn’t sure he’d ever be enough for anyone, but Sam the Handyman decided they were friends as soon as they met, and Tracey talks to him like he’s not a stranger, and even grumpy old Bud smiles at him every now and then.

Maybe Cas can be human, after all.

* * *

The only thing that could ruin his good mood is Dean Winchester. So of course when Cas pulls up to the cabin, Dean is sitting on the busted-up porch.


	6. Don't Deserve You

_“You said underneath your breath_   
_That you didn't really know_   
_Didn't really know if this is worth it_   
_And I said, as I crawled out of your bed_   
_That if I could, I promise that I would take it all back_   
_You love is a fire and I need the burn, need the burn_   
_I know I'm a liar and I don't deserve, don't deserve you”_   
**_Don’t Give Up on My Love, Caitlyn Smith_ **

He knew where Cas would be as soon as Sam sent him the address. It led to some little family-owned hardware store in a tiny town in Washington, but Dean knew Cas wouldn’t be there. As soon as he pulled up to the cabin he could see the signs. A pile of charred wood, the ripped-up porch and patched-up roof. Someone has been living here.

Cas has been living here.

Getting out of the Impala and walking to the front door felt like swimming upstream against a strong current, but Dean forced himself to wade through it, step by step, dread weighing down his feet as he raised his hand to knock on the front door.

He can only imagine Cas answering and slamming the door in Dean’s face as soon as he sees him. He might even deserve that.

Dean knocks once, twice, three times. No answer. No sound of creaking boards inside the house, like someone’s come to investigate. He looks in a window. The room is dark, empty. Now that he’s paused in his panic, Dean realizes Cas’s truck is nowhere to be seen. So he sits down on the front step, avoiding the huge hole in the porch, and he waits, heart in his throat.

* * *

He hears Cas’s truck bumping up the pothole-marked drive before he sees it. He can’t make out Cas in the driver’s seat, and when he pulls in behind the Impala and doesn’t get out, Dean rises to his feet, just to make sure.

He swallows hard as their eyes meet over the hood. Cas’s are wide, unblinking, just the right shade of blue.

Cas moves to open the door, and Dean snaps out of his trance. He has about five seconds to think of what he needs to say just to get his foot in the door here, and his mind is a spinning, whirring blank. Cas stops about two feet away from him, expression schooled into something unreadable, and the first thought that comes to Dean’s mind is _what’s with the personal space, Cas?_

“Hey,” he manages to squeeze out as Cas’s eyebrows pinch together. His lips flatten into a thin line. Pissed, then. Dean expected that. He planned for it on the endless drive here. He had things to say, words to try and throw water on the fire destroying their relationship, but now it’s like there’s a kink in the hose. He’s got nothing more than “hey.”

Cas brushes right past him without a word. Dean’s left standing there, rooted place, shocked. No _hello, Dean,_ no flat _what the hell are you doing here?_ Nothing. As soon as his brain processes this, Dean turns to go after him.

“Cas, wait!” Cas is walking up the steps, leaping over the hole in the porch, unlocking the front door, all without looking back at Dean. “C’mon, we need to talk.”

At this, Cas’s head whips around. Dean has seen this fury in his eyes before; hell, he’s seen it directed at him. But this time he wasn’t expecting it, not at this level. Maybe because of Cas’s utter resignation when he left, his despondent, silent trip out the door and out of Dean’s life, maybe because Cas still tried to answer his prayers when he really needed it, but Dean expected Cas to _say something_.

They stare at each other for so long it’s uncomfortable, and not in the way that makes Sam shift and glance knowingly between them.

“Cas,” Dean tries again, and Cas interrupts.

“I want you to leave,” he says, and he goes inside and closes the door behind him.

Dean’s not delusional. He knows in romantic comedies when the dude relentlessly pursues the girl despite her rejections, it’s not actually romance. It’s stalking. He’s not going to do that Cas. He’s not going to force himself on the guy, refuse to leave and camp out in the Impala in his front yard. He’ll walk away if he has to, if Cas needs him to. Even though he’s starting to suspect leaving now will kill him slowly, tear him up from the inside out.

He gives it one last shot, standing alone on the bottom step, head bowed and eyes closed. Official. He puts everything into it, all his longing and regret, and hopes, _prays_ Cas still has enough juice to hear him out.

_I’m sorry. I’m so sorry._

Dean lifts his head. He hears the wind, blowing across the bay and bringing the faint tinge of salt with it, and a bird calling to another in the tree behind him. No footsteps in the house. No one’s coming to the door. He sighs, and the tears forming in his eyes drip down his cheeks, but he makes himself move, walking to the car robotically. One foot after the other. Left, right, left. Just leave.

He’s just pressed his hand to Baby’s smooth, shining finish when he hears the front door open.

Cas stands there, watching him. Dean watches back, drinks him in. The familiar curve of his cheekbone, his ruffled dark hair, his unreadable eyes. What Dean wouldn’t give to hug him one last time, to press his face into the space between Cas’s shoulder and neck, to breathe him in.

“It’s going to storm,” Cas says, eyes flicking from Dean to the horizon. “You should come inside.”

* * *

Dean feels like he’s dreaming — the whole scene has a vague unreality to it, a dimmed glow he can’t imagine is true to real life. Cas moves around the cabin with ease. He knows where everything is, and he’s comfortable here. He starts a fire in the fireplace without asking Dean for help, bustles to the kitchen to put something on the stove without a word. Dean sits on the couch — it’s a bad couch, lumpy and hard at the same time — and stares into the flames of the fire, waiting for Cas to kick him out.

Instead, Cas hands him a bowl of soup, still steaming. The vapors curl in the air as he passes it to Dean, their fingers brushing in the exchange.

“It’s vegetable soup,” he says. “I don’t have anything else.”

“That’s fine,” Dean manages, though he feels his limbs short-circuiting from being so close to Cas. They want to reach out, hold him without Dean’s explicit approval. “I’m starved.”

He is, too. Dean didn’t eat on the way to Washington. He barely stopped. It’s past lunchtime and not yet time for dinner, but he wolfs down the soup, surprised he can even stomach it with Cas sitting in the armchair, watching him.

“It’s good,” he says, for lack of anything else to say. Cas doesn’t respond.

When he’s finished, Dean stands to take the bowl to the sink, but Cas stops him. “I’ve got it,” he says, not looking at Dean as he takes it. Dean sinks back down into the couch, listening to the sound of Cas turning the water on, rinsing the bowl out and then drying it. He wonders how long it takes to clean one bowl, but figures Cas has earned the right to avoid him as long as he can. In the distance, Dean hears the burbling, rolling sound of an approaching thunderstorm. He glances out the window. The sky is darkening out over the bay, and clouds are building on the horizon.

“Is the, uh. Is the roof gonna hold?” he asks when Cas finally comes back to the living room.

“Yes. I patched it recently.” Cas glances toward the ceiling, the beginning of a slight smile pulling at his lips.

“ _You_ patched it?” Dean doesn’t mean for his voice to sound as incredulous as it does.

Cas’s smile falls. “Yes. My friend Sam helped me.”

“You— You made a friend named _Sam_?” And god fucking damnit, Dean cannot stop sounding like a jackass to save his life.

“Yes,” Cas says again, and he’s closing off, worse than during Dean’s silent dinner.

“Sorry, just... What are the odds, right?” Dean tries to joke, but it falls flat.

“High,” Cas says. “It’s a very popular name.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

In the ensuing silence, Dean hears every crack and pop of the firewood burning, every slight boom of distant thunder. He thought he could do this. Now he’s not so sure.

“Is there a reason why you’re here, Dean?”

 _Yes, I’m here to tell you I fucked up._ If only he could say that out loud. He tries to. His mouth opens and his throat closes, and nothing comes out. Cas stares at him, face blankly unimpressed.

“Right,” he says, shaking his head as if he’s confirmed something to himself. “Well, you’re free to sleep on the couch while the storm rolls through. There are spare blankets in the hall closet. I have work to do upstairs. I suspect you’ll be leaving in the morning?”

“I—” Dean wants to say _not without you_ , but of course it’s just not happening for him.

“Good night, Dean.” With that, Cas stands and walks past him to the stairs, taking them hard and fast, two at a time, as if he can’t wait to get away from Dean. Which, fair. Sometimes Dean wishes he could get away from himself, split from his body like so much black smoke, pour out of all the cracks in his soul and just float. Of course, the last time he tried that, he reached out to Cas anyway.

He lays down with a sigh, wincing when the edge of his ear hits a spring that’s poking up into the fabric. He glances at the clock. Not even 5 p.m., and Cas is done with him for the day.

It’s going to be a long night.

* * *

The storm blows through at six, and it doesn’t let up for hours. Dean is lucky Cas let him stay; he can’t imagine trying to navigate the twisting, dark roads through Pacific Northwest forest in this. Every bolt of lightning rattles the small cabin, and the wind whistles against the windows and door frames, spills down the fireplace.

The living room is cold, even with the two blankets Dean pulled from the hall closet. He’s shivering, pressed tightly against the back of the couch like that might help, legs curled up into his torso. He didn’t think he’d get much sleep tonight anyway, obsessing over Cas, but now it’s looking like he’ll get no sleep at all.

A strong gust of wind shakes the house, and Dean buries his head under the blankets as a burst of lightning fills the room with blinding light. The resounding crack of thunder almost hides the sound of footsteps on the stairs, but it doesn’t cover Cas’s soft, “Dean?”

For a moment, he considers pretending like he’s asleep, taking the coward’s way out. But he’s already damaged this so far beyond repair, what’s a late night argument gonna do? Dean pokes his head out from under the covers.

“Cas?”

“Have you slept at all?” He can barely make Cas out, his silhouette standing still on the bottom stair.

“No… I’m, uh— I’m a little cold.”

“I thought as much.” Dean thinks he hears Cas sigh. “Come on, come with me.” Then the silhouette is a smudge walking back up the stairs, and Dean is on the couch with his mouth hanging open. He snaps out of it quickly, scrambling up after Cas with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, the tail end trailing by his feet and nearly tripping him as he jogs up the stairs.

“Cas?” he asks, but it’s easy to spot him. There’s a lamp light on in one of the bedrooms, and Cas is getting under the covers on one side of the bed. He looks at Dean, expression unreadable in the dim light.

“You can sleep in here,” he says, jerking his head toward the unoccupied side of the bed. “It’s warmer under the quilts.”

Again, Dean feels the sensation of moving through a dream, somewhere outside his body as it walks, step by stiff step, to Cas’s bed, pulls the covers back, and crawls in. It’s someone else, not him, never him, lying so close to Cas he can feel the heat off his body, feel the bed creak as he shifts after turning the light out. Dean can’t seem to move, lying flat and still as a board, staring at the ceiling, wondering if he’s going to wake up in the bunker alone.

He stays awake for a long time, listening to Cas breathe.


	7. So Cold and So Cruel

_“It'd be just one glass of whiskey_   
_Instead of drinking the whole bottle dry_   
_Ooh, I'd let some other somebody kiss me_   
_Just to feel what it feels like_   
_I'd do exactly what you did to me_   
_Yeah I could be so cold and so cruel_   
_If I didn't love you”_   
**_If I Didn’t Love You, Caitlyn Smith_ **

Cas doesn’t know what possessed him to invite Dean into his bed the night before. Some temporary madness, perhaps.

Or love. But he doesn’t want to think about that.

He gets out of bed early, leaving Dean sleeping alone. He’s drooling on the pillow. Cas sees it and almost smiles.

The plan for today was to finish painting over the mural in the nursery, but Dean’s arrival shot that to smithereens. Cas isn’t sure what to do with him — he’s just angry enough to make him leave, and misses him just enough to ask him to stay. Either way, the overall plan to “move on” has endured quite the setback.

He’s not much of a cook, but he has learned how to make coffee over the years, so Cas puts a pot on while making a bowl of cereal for himself. Dean prefers bacon and eggs in the morning, but Cas has neither of those things in stock. He’s not sure he’d make Dean breakfast even if he did.

It takes about fifteen minutes, and the smell of coffee wafting up the stairs, for Dean to show his face in the kitchen. There’s a quilt pattern pressed into his cheek. His hair is mussed and his eyes are bleary. He looks very appealing, in an intimate sort of way, and Cas hates the smile trying to worm its way onto his face at the sight of him.

“Hey,” Dean says, voice gruff and sleep worn. “Coffee?”

Cas silently makes him a mug, and Dean takes it with a rough, “Thanks.” He doesn’t ask for anything else, so Cas puts the cereal away just to have something to do with his hands. He wonders how long Dean will stay; if he plans to speak up at all before he leaves.

Cas doesn’t have to wonder long.

“Hey,” Dean says again from behind him. Cas stops washing the dishes. “Cas, look, I...”

He turns around to face Dean, leaning against the sink with his arms crossed over his chest. He sees no reason to make this any easier for him. After all, the past month has been hell on Cas. So he says nothing, watching Dean stumble, feeling blindly in the dark for the right words to say.

“I’m sorry,” Dean manages finally, and it seems like an effort for him to say it, but not an insincere one. Cas suspects this has been bottled inside Dean for weeks, and now he’s trying to choke it all out as fast as he can in an effort to convince Cas to forgive him. “What I said... I shouldn’t have said it.”

“You mean you shouldn’t have told me I was dead to you, or you shouldn’t have told me I’m the thing that always goes wrong?” It hurts to say those words, hurts to remember them, and Cas wraps his arms more tightly around himself.

“Jesus, both.” Dean lets out an explosive sigh and puts his head in his hands. “I fucked up, okay? I was— First it was Mom, then it was Chuck, and everything went sideways so fast I didn’t have a second to breathe, much less think rationally.”

“Right,” Cas says flatly. “So your natural response was to lash out at me in the cruelest way you could think of.”

Dean flinches. “It’s not just you, Cas; I do that when I’m upset. I don’t mean—”

“Have you ever told Sam he was dead to you?” Cas snaps, sure of the answer. Dean can call him brother all he wants, but at the end of the day, Cas knows what he truly is — expendable. Not like Sam at all.

“Yes.” Dean looks Cas directly in the eye for once. “After Charlie died. And I regret that, too. So fucking much.”

“Then you’d think you’d have learned your lesson by now,” Cas says, unwilling to give an inch, to reveal his surprise that Dean would tell Sam, the focal point of his life, he wished he were dead.

He expects Dean to push back, to argue. Instead he says, with an air of defeat, “I’m not that great at learning life lessons, if you hadn’t noticed. Didn’t exactly have some great role model to teach me what ‘sorry’ meant.”

Cas refuses to pity him, even though his heart is screaming at him to back off, to pull his punches before he draws blood. He’s been told before that he can be relentless, dogged and righteous to a fault — more like Dean than he’d care to admit. Maybe they wouldn’t hurt each other like this if they didn’t have so much in common. “I’ve known you for a decade, Dean. That’s plenty of time for some personal growth.”

For a moment, Dean’s eyes flare with anger, and Cas feels an odd surge of mixed feelings — satisfaction and chagrin, vindication and resignation.

“We lost control—” Dean pauses, reigns himself in. “I mean, I lost control of my life. That’s what it is, Cas. Chuck came in and told us we were all characters in his soap opera, and I’m not handling it well, okay? And with Mom gone — I just got her back.” His voice wavers. “Then she’s gone, poof, and Jack is soulless and then dead and you’re pissed and leaving, and it’s all plot points.”

Dean starts to pace, a slight edge of hysteria in his voice as he says, “I’ve thought my entire life that all my shit decisions, all my heartaches, all my wins were mine alone. Mine, and Sam’s, and yours. But then Chuck wrecked that. It felt like—” He hesitates, and Cas doesn’t rescue him this time. “It felt like none of it was real, Cas. Like I could lash out at you and it wouldn’t matter because you weren’t there for me, anyway. You were there because Chuck wanted you to be, not because you _chose_ to be.”

Cas has heard enough. “Dean Winchester,” he says, low and dangerous, “every choice I made since I pulled you out of Hell has been real and has been _mine_ , and most of them have been because of you. And what did I get for my choices?” He waves a hand in Dean’s direction, and Dean flinches. He’s not the only one who can be cruel, and Cas has years of frustration and anger dying to explode from him like shrapnel. “I get _you_. Driving me away again and again, and calling me back when you need me. What about me, Dean? Am I allowed to need anything out of this relationship?”

Dean’s eyes are watery. “Yes, Cas, of course—”

“Well, I need you to tell me what you want from me!”

The silence hangs thick and heavy. Cas’s phone buzzes in his pocket, and he ignores it. Dean swallows, says, “I need you to come back. You’re my best friend. I want us to be okay.”

Cas shakes his head. “That’s not good enough. I’ve heard it too many times before. Nothing ever changes.”

“What do you want me to change?” Dean asks, voice rising in frustration. “Just tell me, and I’ll do it!”

Before he can calm down enough to put it into words, Cas’s phone buzzes again. Dean groans, spinning on his heels as he starts to pace the kitchen. Cas pulls his cell out of his pocket. It’s Sam.

“Hello?” he answers, turning away from Dean.

“Cas! Is this a bad time?” Sam’s tinny voice is loud, carrying into the room. “I was gonna ask if you wanted to go to the diner for breakfast, but you sound weird…”

“No, breakfast would be great.” Cas exhales through his nose, pinching the spot between his brow. “I can be there in thirty minutes.”

“Oh, okay, cool. Uh, I guess I’ll head that way, too. See ya soon?”

“Yes, see you soon. Bye.” Cas hangs up, immediately grabbing his wallet off the counter. Dean watches him, mouth drawn in a thin line.

“So that’s it, then?” he asks when Cas’s hand is on the door knob. “You’re gonna walk out and not even bother to finish this?”

“Yes.” Cas doesn’t look back at him. “Remind you of someone?”

He leaves Dean alone and open mouthed, and he tries not to feel too guilty about it.

* * *

The “diner” in town is actually a Denny’s, but the locals like to conveniently pretend it’s not. Cas hates the food, but Sam seems to enjoy the taste of rubbery egg omelets.

Sam is already at a table when Cas arrives, flustered and sweating and still silently fuming. Sam takes one look at him and says, “Okay man, who pissed in your coffee this morning?”

For a moment, Cas considers not answering. He picks up his menu and fiddles with the torn laminate at the corners, rubbing his thumb over the sharp plastic. Sam, usually more than happy to fill any silence, watches him, passive and patient. Cas doesn’t know why Sam cares, other than he’s a good person. If Cas is going to tell this story to anyone it might as well be someone kind and open-hearted.

He stares at the burger menu while he says, “You asked me once if I was running from something.”

“I remember,” Sam replies evenly. His face betrays no emotion. He’s waiting for Cas to talk.

“I was. I am.” Cas rips at the edge of the plastic, pulls a sliver off the menu. “He caught up to me.”

“Ah,” Sam says, brow furrowed.

“Yeah.”

“Are you in trouble? Is he— Is he dangerous?”

Cas almost laughs. What a question. Is Dean Winchester dangerous? Yes, in every way that most people would count — after all, he’s a stone cold killer with a silver tongue and deadly charm. Dean Winchester stood toe to toe with the devil and God himself. He’s enamored even the king of Hell and earned the respect of Death. He’s the most dangerous man Cas has ever known. But that’s not what Sam means.

“He won’t hurt me, Sam.” Not physically, anyway. Sam’s shoulders relax, but not by much.

“Who is he, exactly?” he asks. Cas can see he’s trying for nonchalant, keeping his eyes focused on the coffee mug in front of him.

“My—” _Everything_ is the word Cas almost says, but he catches himself just in time. “My best friend. Former best friend. We had a...disagreement.”

“Must be a big falling out to drive you all the way to Washington state,” Sam jokes half-heartedly. Cas is having trouble reading him. He seems upset by the news Dean is here; more upset than is probably warranted.

Cas says, “It was a huge ‘falling out.’”

“But he’s here to apologize?”

“Yes.” Cas puts the menu away so he won’t tear it up anymore, smiling at the waitress who’s materialized to take their order. He gets an omelette, though he knows he won’t enjoy it. Once she’s gone, he continues, “He wants to make amends.”

“You’re not interested in that?”

On the contrary, Cas would have liked nothing more — a month ago. But now those feelings of guilt and inadequacy and loneliness have swelled into an unstoppable tide, and he’s swamped by his own anger. “I wasn’t exactly receptive to him.”

“I see.” Sam takes a sip of his coffee, puts it down and rubs his finger along the rim. “That’s not really an answer to my question, though. Do you want his apology? Do you want to offer any forgiveness?”

Cas swallows. Sam watches him, uncharacteristically quiet.

What does he want? He told Dean the same old, same old wasn’t good enough. It’s not enough to claim to be friends, to be brothers, and then to hurt each other at every turn. Because he knows it’s not just Dean — he’s part of the problem, too. He keeps things to himself, tries to take the world on his shoulders to keep Dean safe, and all Dean sees is Cas turning away from him. It’s possible they’ve been coming at their relationship at loggerheads for over a decade now, and he’d just like to end the confusion. He’d just like them to tell each other how they really feel.

It occurs to him he’s never told Dean how much he loves him. Perhaps it’s too late.

He’s such a hypocrite.

“Cas?” Sam questions.

“I—” He needs to go. He needs some time to think. Maybe he’ll go to the cove, or maybe he’ll drive to nowhere, but Cas needs time alone to decide whether love is enough to cover all they’ve done to each other. He wants to forgive Dean. He wonders if the mere desire is enough to change _want_ into _can._ “Sam, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but I have to go.”

Sam sighs, but he stands with Cas, pulling him into a hug. “Don’t worry,” he says, voice muffled as he talks into Cas’s shoulder. “I got the bill.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Cas protests, “I can—” but he’s cut off when Sam presses a soft kiss just above his eyebrow. Every argument dies in his throat. Oh. _Oh_.

“You should go,” Sam says, voice tight. He’s still smiling, though not as broadly as usual.

Cas repeats, “I’m sorry,” useless as it feels.

“No problem.” Sam is already sitting back in the booth, drifting away from him.

Cas knows no matter what happens with Dean, he’s already made a choice here and now — Dean is worth more to him than this. More than Sam, more than North Cove or South Bend or the house. He’d walk out on it all simply to have more time to work things through with Dean, forgiveness or not.

Dean will always have a claim on him. Always.

“Goodbye, Sam,” he says, and he leaves before Sam can see the tears welling in his eyes.

He’s going to have to stop running someday, but it might not be today.

* * *

As he turns onto the highway, mind racing faster than his tires can spin, Cas feels something tugging at him like a hook in his heart. He blinks the moisture out of his eyes, touching his breastbone as the feeling intensifies. It calls to him, reaches for him, much like Dean’s longing used to. But this isn’t coming from Dean.

 _Impossible_ , he thinks. All this time and he’s sensed nothing of his son, but now — now when he’s torn between fleeing to Dean or fleeing away from him, he finds what he was looking for in Washington all along.

It’s only a remnant. But he still feels Jack’s presence.

Cas turns away from the signs pointing him toward North Cove and follows the tug in his heart to Tacoma.


	8. Lose You All Over Again

_“_ _If I could've seen it all when you first walked in_  
 _Could've read the last page first_  
 _If I would've known just how the story ends_  
 _And how bad it would hurt_  
 _I would do it all_  
 _I would lose you all over again_ _”_  
 **_All Over Again, Caitlyn Smith_ **

_I deserve this._ Dean watches Cas drive away, tires spinning and kicking up gravel. Of course he’d come all the way out here to watch Cas leave him behind again. But this time it’s not for some godly mission or higher calling. This time it’s because Dean laid it all out there, and he’s still not good enough.

He resists the urge to throw his mug, because he doubts breaking Cas’s shit is going to endear Dean to him. Instead, he mechanically cleans out the mug and the pot, putting away the coffee beans and wiping down the counters. All the while, he wonders about this Sam. Secondary Sam, Lesser Sam, who calls Cas and gets an answer and a smile. Cas’s new best friend.

Maybe something more, and ain’t that just a kick in the head. Dean does throw the rag down into the sink, because at least that won’t cause any more damage.

He needs a distraction. A bottle of whiskey sounds real good right about now, but he doubts Cas keeps liquor in the house. He searches through the cabinets anyway, finding mostly dried foods and canned goods, but there is an almost empty decanter in the back. _Bingo,_ he thinks, victorious as he draws it out from its hiding place.

Only when he’s holding it in his hands, seeing the evidence of how much of it is gone, does Dean realize what this means. A, Cas, who doesn’t really drink, downed almost an entire bottle of whiskey alone, or two, he finished it off with someone’s help (Lesser Sam’s?). Both alternatives are too depressing to consider, and Dean shoves the bottle back into the corner of the cabinet and closes the door.

There must be something else to do around here. He wonders how Cas has occupied his time locked in a cabin in the middle of nowhere for a month, then rejects that line of thought. Dean already knows the answer anyway — he’s been repairing the place, bit by bit, with Stupid Sam’s help.

Dean thinks he might hate this other Sam.

He imagines what he might be like — short, probably, much shorter than the real Sam. Not handsome at all. Probably pretty plain looking, actually, with a boring personality to boot. All in all, Secondary Sam can’t be anything to write home about, he tells himself.

_Then why did Cas leave you to hang out with him?_

Fuck it. He’s gonna drink the rest of that whiskey after all.

He’s not really thinking about anything other than getting a buzz when he sits down at the head of the dining room table, glass in hand. But when he sets the drink down, Dean notices the stain. It’s uneven, a blob of a spot about as wide as a dinner plate, darker than the wood around it. He stares at it for a second, unsure what would do that to wood. Then it dawns on him.

_“Dean.” Sam keeps repeating his name, voice urgent and scared. “Dean, come on. We have to go. You can’t sit here forever. It’s time.” He made Sam leave, muttered some excuse about someone needing to watch the kid. Sam bought it, or else he just couldn’t stand to be in the room with Cas’s corpse any longer._

He put Cas’s body on this table. He had to get it out of the elements. He’d hoped, even as they were laying him down, that when they came back there’d be a miracle and Cas would be alive and well. Tilting his head, saying, “Dean, what happened?” But Cas was still dead. Dean tore down the curtains that used to hang over these windows, wrapped the body with them, hands trembling, legs nearly giving way. He did what he had to do, but he never cleaned the blood stain off the fucking table.

How was he supposed to know he’d be back here? A shudder wracks its way through his body, and he puts his head in his hands. How was Dean supposed to know he’d be back here, with Cas alive and well, and he’d still be miserable? He drags his fingers through his hair, tearing at the roots.

He remembers every detail of that day — the light bursting from Cas’s chest as his grace was extinguished, the grainy wet sand beneath his knees, the weight of the body and the iron stench of the blood. The fear and the anger as he leveled a gun at Jack, ready to punish him for taking Cas from him.

 _Jack._ Fuck. Dean takes in a shuddering breath. His kid, _their_ kid, and Dean pointed a gun at his head in front of Cas. What is wrong with him? Why would Cas forgive him for any of this shit?

Dean swipes the whiskey off the table and starts drinking straight from the bottle.

* * *

The sun has drifted below the horizon when Dean finally hears Cas’s key turning in the lock downstairs. He’s been gone all day. Dean’s drunken stupor faded hours ago, leaving him depressingly sober and alone. He lost track of time, crawled up the stairs and into Cas’s bed, dragged the quilts over his shoulders. Dean’s curled in a ball on the bed with his back to the door when Cas comes in. He waits, silent, wondering if he can get away with pretending to be asleep if only so Cas doesn’t kick him out right here and now.

He feels Cas settle on the other side of the bed. He squeezes his eyes closed. The first touch of a hand to his back is tentative and light. Dean’s shoulders shake. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I do this shit; I can’t ask you to forgive me. I don’t know why you stuck around so long in the first place.”

Cas’s hand rubs once up and down his back. Cas says, “I believe I made you feel earlier like you were an inadequate substitute for everything I’ve lost. That’s simply untrue. Dean, no matter what happens between us, I want you to know you’ve been everything to me for a long, long time. I’d do it all over again.”

It sounds like the beginning of a goodbye. Dean’s shoulders tense under Cas’s hand. He tries not to sound wrecked as he says, “I can go.”

“You should sleep,” Cas says. He moves his hand away. “You can go home tomorrow. But I’d like you to come with me to Tacoma first. I have something to show you.”

Dean listens to the bed creak as Cas stands up and leaves the room. He keeps listening for the sounds of the front door opening and a car engine revving as Cas leaves him again, but they never come. He falls fitfully asleep to the sound of Cas singing some tuneless old hymn in the shower down the hall.


	9. Fucked Up Remedy

_“My Coca-Cola Hennessy_  
_Everybody says you're no good for me_  
_But you're my fucked up remedy_  
_Boy, you put me back together again”_  
**_Put Me Back Together, Caitlyn Smith_ **

The next morning, Cas wakes earlier than Dean. He leaves Dean sleeping as he quietly packs his clothes and stows his duffle bag in the back of his truck. He’s not coming back here after today. It was a good place to get some space to think, but now Dean’s here he knows there’s no going back to Chinese food with Sam and ripping up floorboards and staring out at the bay and wishing for Jack to return. He has a life to live. It’s not this life of half solitude and painful memories.

He sits on the busted up porch and waits for Dean to come out. He does so no more than thirty minutes later, pale faced with bruises under his eyes and a bag over his shoulder. He looks defeated. Cas looks at him, and he feels even more of that anger start to leak out like water through a sieve.

“Come on,” he says, standing from the stoop. “Follow me.”

“Cas.” Dean tossed and turned in his sleep all night. Cas felt every twist, every nightmare. “Where are we going?”

“I told you: Tacoma. Point Defiance Park, to be more specific.”

“Are you going to try to drown me in the bay?” Dean asks with wary resignation.

“It had occurred to me. But I won’t.” Dean sighs, and Cas says, “Dean, I’m not going to run away again. I want us to talk. But I need to show you—”

“Yeah, you gotta show me something first. I got it.” Dean sighs again, and heaves his bag higher on his shoulder. He looks like a man already resigned to his fate. “Let’s roll.”

* * *

Tacoma smells like the sea. Cas hadn’t appreciated it when he passed through on his way to North Cove. Yesterday, after leaving Sam behind, he drove all the way to Tacoma, sat on the waterfront and listened to the gulls as they swooped in out of the waves of the bay. It was peaceful. It was clarifying.

He has his reasons to still be angry with Dean, and they’re good reasons. Dean also had his reasons to be angry with him — some fair, some very much unfair. Dean wants to fix their relationship; Cas is beginning to think he does, too. And maybe that necessitates he step in and do what Dean can’t — maybe he needs to be the first to clarify what Dean means to him.

Before he can do that, they have to clear the air. Which is why they’re currently walking one of the trails in Point Defiance Park, some of the only ones up at such an early hour. Neither Dean or Cas have spoken since they arrived. Cas can practically feel Dean next to him, wound so tight he’ll snap at any moment, but he doesn’t ask where they’re going or why. They keep walking. When Cas leads them off trail and into the forest, Dean follows without question.

As they walk, the faint sound of other early morning hikers and runners fades along with the noise of the water lapping against the distant shore, replaced by birdsong and the crunching of branches beneath their feet. Cas’s attention is briefly caught by a family of raccoons huddled in treetop, watching them pass by underneath, but he doesn’t stray from his mission.

Finally, they reach the spot. Cas stops in a small clearing, edged at all sides by trees, and waits for Dean to speak.

“Okay,” Dean says after a moment, “I’ll bite. Why are we here?”

Cas looks up, staring into the pink hued dawn sky. “When Jack was born, his powers opened more than one portal. I had an idea this was happening at the time, though I couldn’t confirm it without leaving Kelly to investigate further away from the cabin. In the end, as you know, we only went through the one portal. Of course, after that, I couldn’t look for more.” He watches Dean carefully. Dean swallows, jaw tightening.

“When I left the bunker, at first I only wanted to be away from you.” Dean cringes, but Cas presses on, “Then I was looking for something — a sign, a hint of Jack. Anything to tell me he might still be out there. I thought North Cove was the best place to find what I was looking for.”

“Did you find anything?” Dean asks. They haven’t talked about Jack, and Cas sees how Dean’s fist clenches and unclenches at his side. It’s always going to be a sore subject between them. Better to drag it out from the depths now.

“Yes,” Cas says. He holds his arms out. “Here. Yesterday I drove to Tacoma, trying to decide what to do about us, and I ended up here. I walked and walked, all through the park, and I kept feeling the urge to get off the trail. To go into the woods. So I did. And I felt him, Dean. I felt Jack. Here.”

“Here?” Dean’s voice wavers. He glances around the clearing. Cas sees what he must see — there’s nothing here.

“There’s an energy he had, Dean. I can’t explain it, but it’s the second most powerful energy I’ve ever encountered. It feels like touching the sun. Anytime he used his powers, it rippled off him in waves. And it was here.” He feels tears prickling at his eyes, shakes them away. “There must have been a portal here, once. Nothing but Jack feels like this. Even as close to human as I may be, I won’t ever forget that feeling.”

Dean’s eyes unfocus for a moment, staring into the distance like he can see Jack, smiling and alive and here. Then he blinks and looks back at Cas. “Why did you bring me here, Cas?”

“Despite what happened,” Cas says quietly, “he was your son, too. Dean, I knew from the moment I invited you to sleep in my room that I could forgive you for what you said, for the way you treated me. I was still furious; I still wanted to pick a fight. I wanted to hurt you, too. But I knew I was weak for you, that I could forgive you anything.”

Dean takes in a deep breath, and Cas barrels on, “What you said about Chuck, about none of it feeling real — it’s not an excuse for your actions, but it’s understandable. When you said to tell me what I needed, and you’d give it to me— I left because otherwise I would have forgiven you right then, and I needed more time to be angry. More time to grieve. Because I don’t just need to forgive you for what you said to me. I need to forgive you for pointing that gun at Jack, and I wasn’t sure I could do that.”

“Right.” Dean’s lip wobbles. “Cas, I— I was furious. I was scared of him, and I was scared of what he would do to the world if we let him go. And I wanted him to pay for what he did to Mom, I won’t lie. I wanted to kill him, and that’s the truth — until I had the gun pointed at him, then I knew I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t just him — I mean, I couldn’t kill him, he was my kid — but it was you, too. I couldn’t do that to you.” He rubs a hand across his eyes. “Doesn’t matter now, though. It all went to hell anyway.”

“Yes,” Cas agrees. So much grief, carried between them both. He’s starting to think it would be easier if they shared the load. “It did. And it’s felt like some kind of hell ever since, until I stood here.” It’s an unassuming place, but Cas knew from the moment he entered the clearing — it felt like redemption, like a blessing. “I knew he would forgive you if he was here, Dean. That’s who he was, beneath the powers and the might. He was good. And I want to be good, too. I want to be better—”

“You’re already enough,” Dean says, voice strained. “You don’t have to forgive me to tip some cosmic scale, Cas. You’ve always been good. Too good to me.”

Cas smiles. It feels a bit stiff, but not forced. “I wish that were true. I think we both know I share some of the blame here. I should have told you about Jack.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, “well, I should have let you try to save him before running in guns blazing.”

They’re quiet for a moment. The sky is already brightening overhead, the sun turning it a brilliant blue.

“Cas,” Dean says when the silence grows awkward and elongated. “Does this mean you’re coming home?”

He wants to say _yes_ , but this discussion isn’t over.“Maybe. Dean, I have something else I have to say.”

“All right.” The air of defeat still hangs over Dean. His shoulders hunch, his eyes shutter. “What is it?”

“I told you yesterday that I needed more from you. I implied that being your friend wasn’t good enough. I wish I hadn’t phrased it like that.” He pauses, thinks through his words more carefully. “What I meant was I can’t go back to more uncertainty. I can’t hear you call me your friend only to have you turn on me like that again.”

“Cas, I won’t—”

“I know,” he says gently, “and I believe you. But I’m not finished. Dean, I’ll go home with you and we can work to fix this together, but there’s something I need to make clear first: I’m in love with you.” Dean’s mouth falls open slightly in shock. Cas soldiers on, knowing if he stops now he’ll never say it again. “I love you. That’s why you hurt me so much, that’s why I ran, and that’s why I’m standing here, finally telling you the truth. We can’t live like we used to, leaving these big things unsaid. The truth is I hide more from you than you hide from me, so no more. I love you.”

He’s shaking. It’s an unusual response. A human response. Cas can’t believe he’s said it — a decade of affection and respect and longing, put into three words.

Dean stares at him, gaping. Cas shifts from foot to foot. “Say something,” he pleads.

Dean’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows hard, clearing his throat. “Promise me you won’t walk out again.”

It’s not what Cas wanted to hear, but he says, “If you promise me not to push me away again.”

Dean nods. “I promise.” His voice breaks as he adds, “I love you.”

When Cas told Dean Jack’s grace was the second most powerful force he’d ever experienced, he didn’t say what the first was. Dean’s soul has always been a supernova, and now it flares in such a way Cas can see it even now, near graceless. A fallen angel and the Righteous Man, burning together on Defiance Point. Dean reaches out to grab hold of Cas’s shirt, and his soul pulses sharper still.

It’s not a gentle kiss. Theirs is not always a gentle love. But it is reverent nonetheless, filled with the urgency and ache borne of years of yearning, adoration and frustration. Dean pushes against him, relentless, biting at Cas’s lower lip and sucking in his breath. Cas gives as good as he gets, winding his hand into Dean’s hair and pulling, his fingers scratching against Dean’s scalp. They don’t break apart for some time, and when they finally do they’re both gasping for air.

Dean rests his head against Cas’s shoulder and Cas rubs his palm over the back of Dean’s neck, pressing a kiss behind his ear.

“What now?” Dean asks. Cas hugs him closer. He swears he can still feel Jack, warm and pleased and smiling. Bringing them back to each other one last time.

“Let’s fix this. Together.”

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve been struggling to write for the past year, and every word of this fic felt like pulling teeth. I’m so happy it’s done. It feels like a greater accomplishment than a mere 20,000 words. 
> 
> This was intended to be a bit of a “concept album” fic, as you can probably tell from the lyrics at the beginning of each chapter. I was inspired to write the first chapter after listening to Caitlyn Smith’s “Tacoma” (she wrote the song for Garth Brooks, but her own version is much better imo). I borrowed songs from her various albums to flesh out the rest. 
> 
> Thanks to my artist Kuwlshadow for the lovely work she did for this fic, and thanks to the mods for organizing this challenge, which remains one of my favorites year in and year out. And thanks to you, reader! You’re truly the best.


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